Last week was a disaster with European news pulling all the major U.S. indexes down on lighter holiday week volume. The NYSE composite cratered 5.3%, the Nasdaq plunged 5.1%, the Dow dived 4.8%, and the S&P 500 lost 4.7%. The IBD outlook remains at “market in correction”. Think about raising cash, it’s the only safe place to be at the moment.

With the market in correction, none of the watch list stocks can be considered as buy candidates.

The world’s biggest extraterrestrial explorer, NASA’s Curiosity rover, rocketed toward Mars on Saturday on a search for evidence that the red planet might once have been home to itsy-bitsy life.

It will take 8½ months for Curiosity to reach Mars following a journey of 354 million miles.

An unmanned Atlas V rocket hoisted the rover, officially known as Mars Science Laboratory, into a cloudy late morning sky. A Mars frenzy gripped the launch site, with more than 13,000 guests jamming the space center for NASA’s first launch to Earth’s next-door neighbor in four years, and the first send-off of a Martian rover in eight years.

Well, so far so good, the mission is off to a good start. Of course, there’s still plenty of thing that could go wrong, the landing sequence for setting Curiosity down on the Martian surface looks to be extremely complex, like something Rube Goldberg would come up with.

A Muslim revival at Cairo’s most prominent mosque Friday that drew 5,000 worshippers reportedly turned into a hate-fueled rally, complete with repeated vows to “one day kill all the Jews.”

Led by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest and best-organized political party, the crowd that gathered at the al-Azhar Mosque chanted “Tel Aviv! Tel Aviv! Judgment Day has come!” according to Israeli website Ynetnews.com.

Palestinian guest speakers and spokesmen for the Muslim Brotherhood roused the crowd with speeches aiming to incite Jihad directed at Israel, specifically promoting a “battle against Jerusalem’s Judaization.”

Call Mubarak a dictator, a thug, call him whatever you want, at least he was able to keep a lid on the Muslim Brotherhood and, for the most part, order in the streets. What Egypt has now is rioting in the streets and the Muslim Brotherhood openly advocating genocide against the Jews.

Archaeologists in Mexico have confirmed the discovery of a possible second Mayan reference to the date 2012, offering further ammunition for doom-mongers predicting an apocalypse next year.

Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History acknowledged the reference had been found in a 1,300-year-old inscription made on a carved brick fragment at a ruin at Comalcalco in the south of the country.

Most experts have previously cited only one surviving Mayan reference to the date, on a stone tablet from a nearby site at Tortuguero.

All the CIA’s Lebanon spies wanted was a slice. What they got, allegedly, was a big intelligence failure.

Hezbollah may have just rolled up the CIA’s network of spies devoted to cracking the secrets of the Lebanese Shiite extremist group. If so, it’s because of one of the stupidest, least secure code words in history.

According to ABC News, Hezbollah operatives figured out that CIA informants who had infiltrated the Iranian proxy group were meeting with their agency handlers at a Beirut Pizza Hut. How could Hezbollah deduce that location? “The CIA used the codeword ‘PIZZA’ when discussing where to meet with the agents,” ABC reports.

What were they thinking? It’s unfortunate that people working for us have or are about to lose their lives over something this stupid and easily avoidable. Not only is it extremely damaging to our intelligence gathering efforts, but it’s also going to have a chilling effect on future recruitment efforts. Seriously, who wants to work for amateurs, especially if your life depends on it?